Page 55 of The Edge of Always

‘Does Chloe know where the painting came from?’ I ask, hopeful.

‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘But when she saw you, she said that Mari had mentioned the girl who was in the painting. She said you fled yesterday.’

Now would be a good time for it all to end.

‘Fled is a strong word. More like I made a regular exit from the exhibition space. I don’t like being around lots of people.’

‘I thought you ran a blog with loads of followers?’

I don’t think I told Emmett how many followers I have.

‘It’s just a regular amount. But it’s different when the people aren’t like, right there.’

I cannot tell Emmett that things got so bad that I developed an unhealthy obsession with death art or that I got so lonely that I started looking online for friends.

‘Okay, well, Chloe said that Mari mentioned you yesterday and said that she’d love to talk to you again.’

‘Right.’

I draw the word out.

‘Apparently they all have access to each other’s diaries here and so Chloe has booked you in for eight tomorrow morning. If that’s okay?’

‘That’s fine,’ I say, only slightly disappointed that I won’t get to ask about it today.

‘I’ll come with you, if you like, in the morning.’

It’s a reminder that we have three whole days together after this one. Time with Emmett has always been like this, snatched and short, but never feeling like that at the outset.

‘Okay, that would be nice, thank you.’

The space around us is full, and I’m starting to feel claustrophobic in the entrance.

Emmett smiles. ‘I’ll go tell Chloe.’

Chloe is waiting by the counter, looking over at us both. As Emmett walks towards her again, her face lights up, and I have to turn around and stare at the floor – you know, a totally normal reaction.

There’s a hand on my shoulder. Emmett.

‘Would you still like to go in today? We could see the exhibit properly? And plot out a route of all the places Earl painted in Paris?’

Emmett has his list already and I dare say we could both recall all of the paintings in our sleep. But seeing Earl’s art was always guaranteed to cheer me up, so I readily agree.

Chloe has apparently given us a free pass, a perk of being the subject of their star painting in their star exhibit. It’s not much, but I’m a woman living a wholly perk-free existence, so it brings me momentarily out of my funk.

We walk past some of the main exhibits, catching La Danse by Matisse, and I spot a collection of Gromaire’s. He’d be a good one to feature on the blog, another artist whose life and work were shaped by the First World War.

Earl’s exhibition space is quieter today, but small clusters of people are still milling around. Unlike yesterday (how was it only yesterday?), I don’t make a beeline for The Edge of Always. Instead, I walk to the closest painting to the entrance. I realise that they’ve ordered them chronologically, covering the last five years of his life, from the first painting he sold, down to his last. Earl didn’t always work as an artist, though none of us know exactly what he did the whole time. There were rumours that he’d been everything from a circus performer to an undertaker. He always painted, of course he did, but so much of Earl’s truly early work has gone, disappeared forever.

I recognise everything here; all of it was painted in the garage in Northumberland, a county he was apparently drawn to because he heard it had good mint cake. A part of me just wonders if he wanted to escape after years of looking for Sebastian.

‘His paintings were so bright, weren’t they?’ Emmett asks, standing next to me. It’s true, we’re looking at The Weight of Light, the river one as Mae called it, since it’s the Seine. It’s more expressionist, bright colours and heavy strokes; we wouldn’t even know that it was a painting of the Seine if Earl hadn’t talked about it. He’d told me that though he didn’t like boats particularly, the views from the Seine were some of the most beautiful he’d ever seen. And this is a beautiful painting. It’s reds and oranges and pinks, which give way to blues and purples. It’s romantic and lovely, and it’s impossible not to smile when you look at it.

‘I always wanted to paint things like this,’ I say to Emmett. ‘Pretty colours, you know.’

‘But you rarely did,’ he answers.

I shrug. ‘It wasn’t what I noticed.’